Thursday, May 25, 2006

Ombudsman to Aaro: nice try

Read all about it. I maintain my theory that Aaro and Wheen most likely got caught up in this one because they are mates of Emma Brockes, but they must be ruing the day that they hitched their wagon to Oliver Kamm's own somewhat idiosyncratic jihad against Uncle Noam. Key quote from the Ombusdman:

In his Times column (14/3/06) David Aaronovitch wrote, 'Johnstone, certainly, and Chomsky, implicitly, had most certainly denied the massacre'. Even if you agree with this interpretation of Chomsky's views, and Chomsky and many others deny that extremely vehemently, implication is not 'direct and unambiguous", to use the words of the complainants.

We retain our own view (or at least I retain mine; I don't know why I'm pretending that AW has a single authorial voice. All the other contributors might think that post was an embarrassing piece of shit for all I know but they haven't said so yet. Thanks to Matthew for the heads up).

I think Wheen probably would have liked to dish Chomsky over Bosnia (which he makes a big deal of supposed bad form on Bosnia in his book - 'everything everybody else says is mumbo jumbo but I am right' - - however, a lot of writers like Wheen and Nick Cohen relied on left wing activists to do their intellectual legwork, rooting out facts they publicised. Now they are reliant on the forces of decentism to do the donkey work ,and are being let down by the anal pedants of freedom - Wheen and Aaronovitch here by Kamm's failure to bore the Guardian into Submission, elsewhere Aaro for relying on decent smears on Christian CND types

Actually, Norm is complaining that his article in the Guardian is "slightly abridged". No doubt the EM crowd are "outraged" that the front page isn't given over to the "historic launch" of their glorious manifesto.

As to this: Kamm is already complaining on his blog. He promises a more thorough response to the judgement (Chomsky is Pol Pot; the Guardian is full of anti-semitic Jihadists) later.